Homemade Hook Baits For Big Carp

Free Carp Bait Making Articles

Need a hook bait masterclass? I’ve been teaching beginners to top rods how to make homemade hook baits to compete against the best readymades, for over 15 years. (Writing bait secrets Ebooks for 20 and enjoying making homemade carp baits for 50 years.) I’m only interested in helping you make big carp bait with total confidence!

In carp fishing homemade hook baits rank among your biggest edge! You can make homemade hook baits precisely, using all the ingredients, additives, enhancers and stimulatory effects you personally desire. This includes your hook bait protein and feeding trigger densities, solubilities and releases, breakdown times, textures, coatings, sizes and shapes. Being able to make your hook baits create constant streams of stimulation and attraction chemically and visually, gets fish on the bank!

Homemade hook baits based on milk protein ingredients based on ‘high protein’ nutritional theory have always been so reliable and a go-too solution (literally) for big fish, since the seventies. They’re still my favourite today with a few additional extras!

How your hook baits move in the water is a huge key to success! The way your hook baits break down has a massive impact on the fish and the water column as well as providing competitive advantages over carp feeding caution. Make them differently and you will give your carp a new experience, a new feeding opportunity!

Hook baits are the most important bait in carp fishing; they are the bait that gets your hook inside the mouth. They’d better be the very best baits you ever use, always!

Making homemade hook baits is like creating your own gold; it means taking back your power over how you want to control carp and influence their behaviour around your hook. Give them enough irresistible stimulation and obliterate feeding caution!

With hook baits like pop-ups, wafters and bottom baits, you’ve got to be totally confident in them. When you get to know the feeding triggers, attractors and enhancers etc in them because you’ve chosen them yourself, means truly having a unique advantage in influencing powerful stimulatory effects on carp sensory systems.

Your homemade baits may be single-cultured (and uncoated) or multiple-cultured and multiple-active-coated. (Which do you think is more stimulatory to carp?)

All too many times the visual aspects of hook baits are literally highlighted. Yet you have the edge with hook baits that stimulate carp from range, far out of sight of any visual factors!

Having a working understanding and knowledge of feeding triggers and their levels and dynamics in choices of ingredients etc to create recipes, is really fundamental. This literally all begins at ‘beginner ‘levels in the ECourse and tuition. It must be practical to be effective!

Some hook bait recipes, protein blends, flavour packages and activators will have more impact on the external gustatory system close-up. Others have more impacts on the olfactory system and from range. Receptors along the lateral line, in the face, mouth, fins and throat, as well as gut, along with digestive enzymes, microbiome and (its immunity dynamics seasonally,) cellular metabolism etc, are all available for bait exploitation and optimisation.

Feeding stimulation occurs in various stages of excitement which can be triggered from various distances. This involved such key factors as concentration gradients and threshold points basically meaning your hook baits success is very much linked to the concentration of free soluble amino acids released from your bait.

These along with flavour and soluble additives etc ionise the water and carp are highly sensitive to such subtle differences in water chemistry surrounding their entire bodies. They are as I like to say ‘swimming tongues!’

We can harness the power of this fact in making and designing our hook baits and indeed free baits so they literally lock carp into feeding, in the moment, with zero pre-baiting required to sensitise fish to your bait. This new feeding opportunity isn’t merely about external chemical reactions; it’s deeper still.

For instance, the active biological potency of many hook bait components (which are soluble or at least partially miscible,) are not just detected as ‘flavour smell and taste’ experiences. They instantly get to work to your unique advantage, altering carp brain chemistry, mood and reactive motile actions and behaviours that overcome caution; leading to more hooked fish!

If your free baits get carp into an excited feeding state from range, even in a competitive feeding mode, then your hook baits take this further. Your hook baits may be more intense, more highly-concentrated versions of your free baits, highlighted with triggers and enhancers, appetite stimulators, liquid palatants, sweeteners etc.

Or you can make and exploit hook baits which will stand out, being completely different recipes and flavour, taste experience profiles, different densities, sizes, colours, shapes etc. You can make hook baits sinking bottom baits much heavier than your free baits or much lighter, less dense, wafting our buoyant.

Baits that lift naturally in the delicate currents of a nearby fish movement perhaps as fish taste and explore the experience of your bait. Pop-up baits may be dual-coloured, or contrasting tones, ‘flouro,’ in all the colours of the rainbow!

Boilie baits, paste, and homemade pellets can be pale, looking washed-out as if visually looking having been in the water possibly for days. Maybe vividly-contrasting colours and tones can provide more visually-highlighted visual stimulation up close. Maybe bait soaks and flavoured ‘goos’ are your thing; all can be made, or adapted and refined-tailored to your preferences.

Remember though that although you may have personal opinions and preferences for hook bait colours, maybe yellow or orange, white or red, tones and colours for carp are experienced in water and in varying ambient light in different water conditions over a 24-hour period and in different moon phases.

In clear first light or afternoon shallows on clay, or gravel, or over deep silt, silk weed or other weed at night. Changing moon and sunlight angles can alter perspectives as well as water clarity, turbidity etc.

Enhancing your baits using fermentation or culturing methods more efficiently optimises your baits ionising potential, releasing amino acids; giving your carp signals of digestive short-cuts they’re hardwired to exploit.

Hook bait coating can do this too and this subject is among my favourites in actively working the water column. Penetrating the silt, creating halo effects of triggers around baits, layering and moving bait substances near or far and wide to pull and hold fish. The ability to stimulate carp from range, plus to achieve this long before prime feeding time and prolong this effect, are among the most powerful in competitive fishing situations for big fish.

If all you do is make pop-up hook baits from bland readymade proprietary pop-up base mixes, you’re merely giving your fish a familiar experience they’ve most likely been hooked on before. (Not good!) take back your power. Be different, be personally-creative!

Uniquely-coated homemade hook baits and free baits can easily produce more concentrated dissolved plumes and trails of feeding triggers and attractors than air-dried uncoated baits. They can pull fish from further away, from deeper and for longer periods as each bait works harder! This is why it’s so worthwhile making them!

You need guidance to achieve this which is why I created the Ultimate bait-making secrets ECourse. Many of us learn visually by watching, being more experiential, sensory, tactile learners. This is where 1-1 bait tuition is totally invaluable. The ECourse is actually based on notes from tuitions and the thousands of questions asked over the years and contains countless illustrations.

Learning to make carp bait is like a nutritional culinary master class, so the ECourse, plus the tuition, are a form of tailor-made personalised hook bait master class. It has to be because the only bait that matters most is your hook bait!

I’m a great believer in priming the water column with soluble bait and particulates before prime feeding times. This really sensitises fish where to directly locate your baits (and to their unique nutritional profiles.) well in advance of feeding. On some levels watching fish respond to this is even more exciting that catching the fish because you are controlling their responses in such a direct way specific to your bait designs and bait applications.

Understanding how to create a halo of bait solution around your bait along with a malleable paste as part of your bait and you have a significant chemical and visual advantage over inert firm boilies… As a homemade bait maker, you can create such effects in a myriad of ways that pull fish in stimulated feeding states from far beyond the visual range.

Hook bait recipes, multiple-fermentation, active coatings and active bait soaks are just a part of the armoury of focus in bait tuitions. These can be achieved simply or as complex as you desire. The practical profound internal impacts of bait come in time from creating new baits and experiencing how fish respond and developing a personally-experiential and sensory appreciation of the baits you’re making. It’s not just science; it’s creative culinary experimentation and expression too!

Multiple-coated wafting and floating pop-up baits balance hook weight; a vital edge!
Coated baits with uneven larger surface areas than perfectly round baits radically help bait dispersal and feeding triggers impacts. Handmade hook baits can have unique density and weight and movement properties compared to 360-degree machine or rolling table boilies.

This approach makes it harder for wary carp to ‘sort’ hook baits from free baits. The solutions and particulates released from around hook baits and free baits is more than equivalent to using paste because it can actually be a combination of paste and active powders and particulates chosen to your specifically-desired profiles and movements in the water. This way every bait acts as a time-bomb of ground bait and their effects can be carefully refined for effect before and at prime feeding times.

Both hook baits and free baits can be cultured, including your whole boilie base mix and active coatings. This gives carp nutrient short-cuts that occur in the gut, sparing their own essential amino acids and vital enzymes. (Carp are hard-wired to exploit such short-cuts!)

Sweetcorn-shaped hook bait wafters. Being a homemade bait maker, we can achieve highly advantageous bait forms, textures, shapes and combinations unique to us to catch out wary carp!

Making homemade hook baits is as simple as using a readymade base mix and liquid package, or as complex as our creativity decides. Personally, I choose more complex homemade recipes to give Mr carp more unique reasons to pick my baits up!

A complex of enzyme-active natural fruit extracts can be exploited used as part of a unique enzyme-active attractor, activator package and unique active bait soak. The use of nature-identical and natural extracts offering powerful biological-potency impacts is an effective edge.

This example also avoids risks inherent in using many popular commercial flavours built upon all too familiar solvent bases, such as propylene glycol! Captures of so many big fish in low temperatures of winter on baits with biological potency, for example oleoresins, essential oils, polyphenols and metabolites, are a huge case in point!

Personally, I prefer to use multiple cultured active-coated baits simultaneously. This helps exploit individual fish nutrient needs and feeding and rig sensitivities. It’s also much simpler to ‘seed’ the entire water column, from silt to surface with bait solution and particulates to pull and hold fish any time of year whether in 2 40 feet of water. This has proven to catch a wider diversity of fish for me (as opposed to using just a one single recipe of boilie approach.)

Finished wafter hook bait dough about to be bagged up for further culturing treatments.

Homemade bait creativity keeps paying off…

Culture-activating coatings on hook baits help if bait recipes are inactive… There are very easy and simple methods to culture and activate baits and then there are more involved ones which make baits more stimulatory having more biologically-potent profound impacts on carp sensory systems and metabolism etc.

There are no ‘mistakes in making bait, only learning applied to new applications. For example, baits made as sinking free baits that begin to float enhance understanding of how to make self-buoyant wafters and pop-ups.

Baits made to waft and pop-up and float, that sink can be applied in many ways. For example, chopped and used in active PVA bags and crushed as neutral buoyancy ground bait carpets over silk weed, deep silt and chod. Each ‘mistake’ is in fact a new breakthrough!

This is why keeping detailed recorded oral or visual notes is so vital, especially in the early days of bait-making beginners, experimenting with new ingredients, levels and recipes. The ability to repeatedly constantly refine and remake, adapt and tune new winning baits consistently, comes from keeping these notes so you can always keep making winners with absolute confidence!